The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, was officially launched in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. OASPA seeks to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.
Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organisations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organisations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organisations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website at www.oaspa.org.
The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.
From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities. The recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership are two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.
